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ABEND (15913) writes "Excerpt: "Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice""Link to Original Source

McGruber (1417641) writes "The A. C. Gilbert Company (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...) was once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It manufacturered Erector Sets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_Set), American Flyer toy trains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Flyer), and chemistry sets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry_set).

Chemist John Farrell Kuhns (https://www.kickstarter.com/profiles/1742632993/bio) received an AC Gilbert Chemistry set for Christmas 1959, while he was still in grade school. By the time Kuhns was twelve years old he had a home lab set up in my family's basement. Now, more than 50 years later, he still has a home lab.

As an adult, Mr. Kuhns wanted to share these experiences with his daughter, nephews and nieces, and their friends. But he soon discovered that real chemistry sets were no longer available. He wondered how, without real chemistry sets and opportunities for students to learn and explore, where would our future chemists come from?

In 2004, Kuhns and his wife opened their science store, H.M.S. Beagle (http://www.hms-beagle.com/) and last year used Kickstarter to launch a new Heirloom Chemistry set. (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1742632993/heirloom-chemistry-set). Kuhns uses a CNC router to cut out his wood cases, which are then hand assembled and finished with the shiny brass hardware and exotic wood inlays. Kuhns also synthesizes, purifies and/or formulates and packages all of the chemicals.

Gary Hanington, professor of physical science at Great Basin College, was another child who was lucky enough to own a Gilbert chemistry set. Hanington wrote about his set in this article (http://elkodaily.com/lifestyles/speaking-of-science-a-c-gilbert-chemistry-sets/article_30dc31c8-c258-11e1-9dfd-001a4bcf887a.html).

Sadly, not everyone sees the educational value of real chemistry sets. The AC Gilbert chemistry sets are #3 on Cracked's "The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Toys" (http://www.cracked.com/article_19481_the-8-most-wildly-irresponsible-vintage-toys_p2.html) and #8 on Complex.com's "The 25 Worst Must-Have Christmas Toys Ever (http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/12/25-worst-must-have-christmas-toys-ever/gilbert-chemistry-set)"Link to Original Source

The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.

I started with various British computers (Sinclair QL and Acorn Archimedes), pretty soon acquired a RISCiX (Acorn ARM based Unix) machine. Moved to AMD/Intel hardware with Linux as OS.
DOS/Windows is for work... and usable when it comes with a system administrator.

Nothing in the "Encrypted Media Extension" specs prevents or forbids proxying of both the key and the encrypted media stream to an external "decryption and caching" service.
And all of the usual "how do we prevent the plaintext from leaking from the user's machine" questions are still in full force. It is unlikely that the W3C will get "effective protection".

KPN tried "carrier grade" IP4-NAT in the Netherlands a decade ago... Unfortunately the router software was too buggy and made the routers trash and crash.
And how can the customers of the ISP run servers on their computers? NAT has implications for the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.

I agree that the biggest danger is close to home, family and friends of the family. And while there are "predators" on the net they are far less dangerous than the predators the child may meet in real life. Children are pretty safe with the online equivalent of "don't go with the stranger offering you candy."

What are some good rules of the thumb:

Don't talk to people you are not comfortable with.

Don't tell where you live. "Near Big City" is good enough for someone until you trust him/her.

Be careful with what you show on your webcam.

If you following the advice the Internet is a good place to experiment with political and sexual discussion, pregnancies and STDs come from meeting IRL.

It depends on the exact bug that is triggered. When a security researcher mentions "potentially exploitable bug" it could be serious. Very often a memory corruption is a first step into more serious exploits.

While I don't mind putting some restrictions on someone while (s)he's on probation; the laundry list of conditions sounded like something typed in a decade (or more) ago with some conditions added over time. It is so convenient to have a standard list, without regard for the probatee or his crime!

It is good to have relevant restrictions as conditions for porbation (no alcohol for people convicted of intoxication related crimes), but I don't see any good in a total restriction of computer use for a petty thief (unless he brokers on ebay).